The X files

In a drab living room in Eastern Europe, with thick curtains and
a lone armchair, a young woman is stripped, gagged and bound face
down on a wooden coffee table with red rope the same hue as her
hair.

There are two men in the room. One wears only white sports socks
and a moustache, and he whips her with a cat o' nine tails until
her bare back is red and her tears are dripping onto the carpet.
They have sex as he forces the whip handle into her mouth like a
horse's bit. All the while, the second man stands in the corner,
recording every moment of her ordeal on a video camera.

Her scenes of distress might have stayed there, in that
nondescript room with its grubby coffee table. Yet somehow her
trail of tears crossed the seas to Australia and wound up here -
specifically, on the shelves of the Liberated Bookshop in Elizabeth
Street, Melbourne, where her plight was sold for $35 under the
title Spanking Special 03.

A Sunday Age investigation into Victoria's adult entertainment
industry has found storefront shelves heavy with tens of thousands
of X-rated films, which show real depictions of sex and are illegal
to sell in Australia outside the ACT and Northern Territory.

More worrying though, is the widespread presence of unclassified
films, which have not been submitted to the Classification Review
Board and as such are illegal to sell anywhere in Australia. Most
of those films, such as Spanking Special 03, contain sexual
violence, adult actors pretending to be children having sex, or
images that are gratuitous or offensive towards women - and all
would be likely refused classification outright.

Women, many of whom appear to be actors, are shown stripped,
whipped and chained, or being forced to grip loaded ashtrays
between their teeth. Other films feature women being choked,
urinated on or paraded about wearing signs saying "whore" in bright
red paint. In the unclassified film Pregnant Bondage Number 3,
bought on sale for $10 from Erotica Plus, behind Russell Street in
the city, heavily pregnant women are handcuffed, chained and
worse.

The same store stocks the Tough Love series, produced by US
company JM Productions, which an employee of Erotica Plus says
typically sell out the same day the titles hit the shelves. On one
cover is an image of a naked woman having her head flushed down a
toilet bowl by a man dressed in black. Above them runs the slogan:
"Love should leave marks."

Other films we discover feature sex scenes with actors
pretending to be under the age of 18, which would be refused
classification in Australia under the guidelines of the Office of
Film and Literature Classification. In one DVD, set in an anonymous
office in the United States, a young woman dressed as a schoolgirl
in a short plaid skirt and crisp white-buttoned shirt has sex with
a man she calls her stepfather in exchange for petrol money.

As if to reinforce its focus on "children", Inexperienced
Schoolgirls, an unclassified film bought for $49.95 from among the
"teen titles" at a Sexyland chain store in Thomastown, is narrated
by a man dressed as a circus clown in a crazy red wig, funny nose
and shoes.

VICTORIAN laws ban the sale of films that are X-rated,
unclassified or have been refused classification because they
feature images showing sexual violence, the offensive or demeaning
treatment of women, or child pornography. What, then, do the
stocked shelves of our adult stores say about the state of those
laws?

As The Sunday Age discovered, adult stores openly flout
prohibitions against the sale of X-rated or unclassified films with
seemingly no fear of reproach. Rows of such DVDs are displayed
brazenly on the shelves - and for ease of reference are separated
into categories such as "barely legal", "golden showers" and
"fetish".

At best, the law appears ineffectual - at worst, unworkable.
Victoria Police have the power to enter and search adult stores and
to seize any illegal material, but police sources complain such
prosecutions are typically time-consuming, protracted and
ultimately unsuccessful.

On the record, Victoria Police will only say there is no
evidence of an increase in the illegal trade of X-rated or
unclassified films, or films that have been refused
classification.

Our investigation suggests the contrary is true. Contradictions
abound not only between the law and its enforcement, but also in
the legislation as it is written. For example, while it is illegal
to sell X-rated material in Victoria, there is no law against
buying it, owning it or watching it here.

Tony Burke, president of the Law Institute of Victoria, says the
state's classification law is "anachronistic and ridiculous".
However, he warns that the failure of police to enforce the
prohibition against the sale of X-rated films could encourage wider
illegality. "There is a danger that the law falls into disrepute,"
he says. "When the law is not enforced, it throws into doubt the
whole legal system of Australia."

Fiona Patten, chief executive of the Eros Association, an adult
lobby group, says the sale of X-rated material in adult shops
should be the least of police concerns. She says sexually violent
and other hard-core pornographic material is increasingly being
sold at Melbourne's weekend markets and inside convenience stores
and petrol stations (where DVDs typically might be sold inside
sealed magazines). A film she bought last year from a Saturday
market in Altona, in Melbourne's west, for example, showed women
smothered with chloroform and raped as they lay unconscious.

The Eros Association says such illegal trade would diminish by
changing the state's "outdated" pornography prohibitions to a
licensing system similar to that operating in the ACT, where
inspectors conduct random checks for illegal material. Patten says
adult store owners who are licensed to sell X-rated films would be
likely to assist inspectors in stemming the illegal trade in more
hardcore pornography.

Victoria's leading adult store owners say they already
self-censor "toxic product" such as sexually violent material.
Angelo Abela, founder of the Sexyland chain, says his stores refuse
to carry films that include bondage or abhorrent pornography, such
as a DVD titled Incest. "They're not actually family members,
they're play-acting, but we won't carry it because of the title,"
he says.

But when shown the cover of Inexperienced Schoolgirls, from his
founding Thomastown store, he admits "occasionally something slips
through the net".

Abela, a former muffler and spa salesman, says police are simply
not interested in enforcing the ban on the sale of X-rated films.
"No one's come in to try to prosecute us. We have police come in
and they look at what we sell and they are fine with it," he
says.

Club X boss Craig Hill boasts there has never been a successful
prosecution in Victoria for the sale of X-rated films.

In 2003-04, Victoria Police recorded 152 offences for breaches
of the classification law and arrested, charged or cautioned 64
people. Between 2006-07, those figures had plummeted to only 14
recorded offences and 12 people. Indeed, a Club X employee in
Melbourne, who asked not to be named, told The Sunday Age his store
had not been raided by police since 1991.

"Police, like the majority of our customers, are mature adults
who think that they should be able to watch what they want, when
they want," Hill says.

He compares the prohibition on X-rated films to the law against
homosexuality in Tasmania, which remained on the state's statute
books long after changing community standards had rendered it
effectively irrelevant.

Professor Neil Rees, chairman of the Victorian Law Reform
Commission, instead compares the ban on the sale of X-rated films
with previously stringent laws against any use of so-called soft
drugs.

"A generation ago, the laws relating to marijuana were quite
draconian and for some time huge efforts were not made to enforce
those laws because community attitudes were in the process of
changing," he says.

"It is not unusual for there to be a gap between the law as
written on the books and what actually happens in practice, and
that may result from changing community attitudes and the
government deciding that the best approach is to sit quietly and do
nothing until community attitudes evolve to a point where there
might be support for some significant change in the law.

"In this community 40 or 50 years ago, we had books like Lady
Chatterley's Lover banned. People would now look at this and think
it absurd. And my sense is that community attitudes towards the
sort of materials available now in the adult industry are evolving,
so long as possession is made by adults and not children."

Next month the commission will complete its report on reform of
the anti-abortion laws, which the Government sought only after
several decades of public calls for legislative change.

The adult entertainment industry claims similarly to have the
weight of public opinion carrying it forward towards possible law
reform.

An ACNielsen survey commissioned by Adultshop in September 2006
found only 30% of Australian adults said they were offended by
explicit erotic films. As many as three-quarters of those surveyed
thought X-rated films should be legally available to adults
throughout Australia.

However, the national spokeswoman for the Australian Family
Association, Angela Conway, says there is still significant
opposition within the community to the sale of X-rated and
unclassified films.

"Marketing for these films depicts women as sluts or whores.
Women are talked about as being rammed or reamed, which is a
woodworking term for the hollowing out of a hole with a sharp tool.
Or they are depicted as begging for more pain," she says. "This is
what men learn is normal, they are inculcated into a culture of
violence and hostility towards women."

Meanwhile, the Victorian Government remains silent on the issue.
When asked about potential changes to the classification law, a
spokeswoman for Attorney-General Rob Hulls, who has previously
admitted to watching an X-rated film, simply says such issues are
not "high on the agenda".

Michael Pearce, a vice-president of Liberty Victoria, says
police have rightly shifted their focus and limited resources away
from the sale of X-rated material to stopping the spread of child
pornography.

He argues that beyond banning child pornography, adults should
be allowed to buy and sell whatever material they please. "I can't
see there would be any demonstrated harm coming from this," he
says.

Conway disagrees, saying both the police and the Government
should do more to enforce the law as it stands. "People in our
community should open their eyes to the reality of this industry,"
she says. "These people are absolute sharks, sucking money out of
the community and leaving toxic sludge behind. These are not nice
men."

IN PERSON, the men behind two of the country's largest adult
industry chains seem altogether less bloodthirsty. Angelo Abela,
51, has four children with his wife of 15 years, who works one day
a week in the family business. He has thinning grey hair and drives
a four-year-old Mercedes Benz. Customers to his big, bright and
tacky Sexyland stores receive a keyring tag to scan with each
acquisition, with the promise of free gifts for frequent
purchases.

"We're not embarrassed about the business; it's not dark and
dingy and the old 'raincoat brigade'," he says. "We treat the
business like an ordinary department store. A lot of our staff are
ex-David Jones and ex-Myer people. We don't look for workers from
the adult entertainment industry. We look for experience in
retail."

Club X's Craig Hill says he shares a "modest house in
Melbourne's western suburbs" with his second wife and children. "I
have seen the business move on from the smaller,
blacked-out-windows city stores and our female clientele go from
nothing to 50% of our total customers in about 10 years," he
says.

But it is telling that he refuses to pose for an identifiable
photograph for fear that showing his face could harm his son's
chances of being accepted into a Melbourne independent school. When
strangers ask him about the nature of his job, Hill prefers to
change the subject.

"You are usually selective about who you tell because it could
result in them not allowing their children to come over and play,"
he says.

It is another interesting lesson in the gaps between what is
said (or in the case of the classification law, what is written)
and what is true. No matter the public support the adult industry
claims for law reform, no matter the spread into Melbourne's
suburbs of those adult warehouses that stock marital aids and toys
alongside X-rated and unclassified DVDs, the whiff of dirty linen
lingers still in Victoria's adult industry.

Professor Rees of the Victorian Law Reform Commission expects
several years will pass before there might be sufficient momentum
for change to anti-pornography laws. The tipping point, he
suggests, could be the prosecution of a retailer for selling an
X-rated film made by a mainstream director working outside the porn
trade.

"That might galvanise the politicians into action," he says.
"Until then, I think the police might decide there is no mileage in
them prosecuting anyone."